Revolver

by Marcus Sedgwick

  As the panic subsided, as the rabble began to realize the terrible mistake they’d made, one, an old miner by the look of him, came up to Einar and Mr. Salisbury.

  He shook his head and dropped to his hands and knees in front of them.

  “It’s all a lie!” he cried.

  Mr. Salisbury put out a hand, but he was not fast enough to stop the old-timer from pulling his pistol.

  He shot himself in the head.

  It was on that day that Einar saw him for the first time.

  A giant of a man, a bear in human form, haggard and hairy, with fists like hams. He walked through the rowdy rabble, stepping over the body of the suicide as if it were nothing more than a piece of driftwood.

  He stared at Mr. Salisbury, then yanked off a glove to jab a stumpy finger at him.

  “Where do I get a drink?” he growled.

  Einar noticed the newcomer had no thumb on his left hand.

  I have no hesitation in declaring the Colt’s revolver superior in most respects, and much better adapted to the wants of the Army than the Smith and Wesson.

  JOHN R. EDIE

  CAPTAIN OF ORDNANCE

  ORDNANCE NOTES. NO V.

  WASHINGTON. JUNE 27 TH. 1873

  1910 Giron

  68 LATITUDE NORTH

  14

  Sun Day, noon

  “You can wait outside,” Sig said, but there was as much chance of that as the King of England’s paying a call.

  The man didn’t debate with Sig but strode through the outer door so forcefully that Sig had to press himself against it to avoid being knocked down.

  Sig wasn’t quite sure why he had lied about his father, but it was too late now. He followed the man into the cabin, closing the inner door. The room grew darker, and though the mound on the table seemed like a mountain to Sig, incredibly the stranger appeared not to have noticed it.

  He spun around to face Sig.

  “Gunther Wolff.”

  Silence. Sig stared at the man, though he would rather have looked anywhere else in the room. He couldn’t take his eyes off the visitor.

  “Mean anything?” Wolff said, almost whispering, using no more words than were absolutely necessary.

  Sig shook his head, lifting his hand to rub the back of his neck. He stopped himself.

  Wolff grunted.

  “Too young,” he said, reasoning to himself. “And too long ago, maybe.”

  “What do you want?” Sig asked, but Wolff ignored this question.

  “You don’t remember me. I remember you.”

  The words hung in the air, drifted around the room. They seemed to paint themselves on the walls in letters two feet high. They seemed to be painted in blood.

  “Ten years.”

  Sig’s mind struggled. Ten years … that would mean …

  “Nome. I knew you in Nome. Little then.”

  Sig nodded. From nowhere, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the loss of his father. He fought to turn his thoughts back to the stranger.

  “Did you know my father?”

  Wolff filled the room like a threat, ominous, sinister and unknowable. He was covered almost entirely by his long leather greatcoat, once stark black but now a softer, mottled thing of shadows. His face still unsettled Sig, and now he realized it was the man’s eyes that had this effect on him. The lower half of Wolff’s face was obscured by his beard, and as he pulled the wide-brimmed hat from his head, Sig saw again that he either was bald or had shaved his head to the scalp.

  “Did?” he said.

  Sig spotted his mistake but saw an explanation.

  “In Nome. Did you know him in Nome?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Wolff, and smiled.

  Sig wanted to be sick.

  “Oh, yes. I knew your father. And your mother. And the little girl. What was her name … ?”

  “Anna,” Sig said, and as before when he’d admitted he was on his own in the cabin, he regretted giving even Anna’s name to Wolff.

  “Anna,” Wolff repeated. He seemed to be mulling something over, calculating perhaps, and then he blew Sig’s game wide open.

  “Is that your Pappa under the blanket, boy?”

  15

  Sun Day, after noon

  “Please put that back,” Sig said.

  Once again Wolff ignored him. He held the hem of the blanket with his one thumb and forefinger, lifting it high enough to expose Einar’s sagging face. Almost a day had passed since his death, and already it showed, his skin withering, sallow and gray, sinking, shrinking, his mouth pinching ever tauter.

  “Please,” Sig said again. “Please put that back.”

  There was something truly awful in the way Wolff ignored Sig. With a twinge of fear, Sig realized that it spoke of a complete absence of any need to follow rules. A man who will defile the sanctity of the dead will surely think nothing of breaking any of the laws of the land or the laws of God.

  “Einar,” Wolff whispered, so softly that Sig wasn’t sure of what he heard. “Einar. You have cheated me, but you won’t win.”

  Sig stood halfway across the room, glancing out of the window toward the lake and, ultimately, the town. The view looked as it always did in winter; the domination of the white of the snow, the black-brown of trees the only other color. He imagined running away through the trees, hearing the snow crunch underneath his boots, feeling the peeling bark of a birch tree under his gloved hand as he rounded a corner, seeing the strange orange-stained icicles hanging from outcrops of rock, divulging the secret of the ore that lay in the earth, the reason they were all here.

  He couldn’t see the stranger’s horse anymore. Maybe he’d put it in the barn; maybe it was tied up somewhere. Sig hoped it was in the barn; the cold of Giron was no place for a horse, and he wondered how many animals had died beneath Wolff on his journey.

  Sig jumped as Wolff suddenly dropped the blanket and turned back toward him.

  “When?”

  Sig knew what he meant.

  “Yesterday. About this time yesterday. He was coming across the ice; it must have broken. I found him, then …”

  He stopped himself. He didn’t want to say their names to this man. But why not? Why should it matter if he mentioned Anna and Nadya?

  Wolff stared at Sig, waiting for him to go on. A huge compulsion rose in Sig to blurt out the rest of it, but he fought it. He couldn’t, however, hold Wolff’s gaze and found himself staring at the floorboards. A memory came into his mind of Anna and Nadya kneeling side by side on the floor, rocking back and forth, scrubbing the black floorboards last spring. Anna would have been singing, Nadya silent. It was one of the few times he could remember them getting along so easily.

  And now, where were they? What was taking them so long?

  “I have …” Wolff stopped, correcting himself. “I had … some business to attend to. With your father.”

  Sig opened and shut his mouth, then opened it again.

  “Oh, I see,” he said carefully. “Well, I’m sorry that your trip was wasted.”

  His nerve was weak, but he continued while he had the chance. He felt like he was hearing someone else say the words, as if he had left his own body.

  “So, I expect you’ll want to be getting along now, before it gets dark.”

  Wolff pulled a chair from the table upon which Sig’s dead father lay.

  “Coffee,” he said. “Want coffee.”

  He folded his arms and thrust his booted feet out in front of him on the boards. Reaching around behind him, he set his hat down to rest on the barrel of Einar’s blanketed chest.

  Sig felt himself go cold inside.

  He walked toward Wolff deliberately, trying not to tremble, and lifted the hat from his father’s body. He carried it over to the hooks on the beam nearest the door and hung it there as calmly as he could.

  “Coffee,” Sig said. “Yes, I can make you some coffee before you go.”

  All the while, Wolff watched him. Sig snatched only a glimpse of his face, and still i
t was unreadable, or was that, my God, a trace of amusement on Wolff’s lips? Sig would almost have preferred to see irritation, even anger, than sense that he was being toyed with.

  Sig opened the belly of the stove and threw another small split log inside. The door closed with a satisfying whump, and he heard the log crack as the heat from the stove tore into it.

  He filled the kettle from the water can and put it on the top of the stove, then made for the inner cabin door.

  “Stop,” said Wolff, and Sig stopped, his hand already on the door latch. “Where?”

  “Coffee’s in the storeroom,” Sig said. “Just there.”

  He nodded toward the cabin wall.

  “Go on,” Wolff grunted, and Sig felt the rock in the pit of his stomach grow heavier. Was he a prisoner now, in his own home?

  He made his way through the inner door of the cabin, and while every instinct urged him to rush outside, he instead turned to his right and pushed into the darkness of the storeroom. It had no window, just a small row of adjustable slats high up on the short north wall so that it would be cool even in the brief but fierce summer. With the door ajar, there was enough light to see, and besides, he knew where everything was in that room, even in the dark.

  He knew where the sacks of flour and meal on which he slept were. He knew where the butter was kept, and the honey and the coffee. He put up his hand and pulled down the coffee tin, and knew that behind it lay a long, slim, flat wooden box, one that had traveled halfway around the rim of the world with them over the last ten years, one that Nadya insisted be hidden in the larder, away from the reach of an angry hand or a thieving heart.

  16

  Sun Day, after noon

  “Forgive?” Einar had asked. “How can you forgive the bad things people do?”

  Sig remembered the first time Einar and the woman who was his new wife had argued, and he recalled the irony that Einar’s first argument with Nadya was, according to Anna, the very same one that he used to have with Maria.

  Nadya closed her eyes, as she always did when she was quoting the Bible.

  “‘How many times shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Seven times? And Jesus said, no, not seven times, but seventy times seven.’”

  That was enough for Einar to really lose his temper.

  “Don’t spout that nonsense at me!” he roared. “You don’t even believe it yourself anymore. If you did, you’d still be living with that lunatic preacher and his flock of idiots! Forgive! Tell me, girl, how you would forgive a man who’d murdered you?”

  “No one is going to murder us,” Nadya said. “This is a peaceful place.”

  “What do you know of anything?” Einar said viciously. “What have you seen of the world?”

  “I’ve seen some of it.”

  That was true. Sig had managed to glean enough about her life with the revivalist preacher and his community to know that. The preacher had taught abstinence from alcohol, from meat, and most of all from sex, but it turned out that he didn’t seem to believe those laws applied to him. Nadya had left soon afterward, coming down from the Finnish border and ending up working at a hotel in Giron, which was where she’d met Einar.

  “Then you should know there are evil men everywhere, and if one of them comes here one day while I’m away, you’ll be glad I taught the boy to shoot!”

  At that, Sig felt his heart start to race, but a moment later he heard the door slam as Anna stormed out of the cabin, unable to bear the fight between her father and her stepmother.

  “Boy!” Wolff called through the wall.

  Sig hurried back into the cramped space between the three doors, each leading to a different ending, a different path.

  One path led outside, to running away.

  One path led back inside, to Wolff.

  And one path led back into the storeroom, to the Colt.

  But if his path led there, wondered Sig, where in God’s name would it go after that?

  Sig paused in the hall, looking at his boots. He put the coffee tin down for a few moments while he pulled them on. He was not going outside, but something told him it might be a good idea to be ready.

  “Sorry,” he said, coming back into the cabin. “The first tin was almost empty. Full one.”

  He shook the tin at Wolff, the beans inside rattling noisily.

  “Won’t be long.”

  Sig turned to the counter that ran under the window by the back of the cabin, looking out into the pine forest. He pulled the coffee grinder from the shelf above the window, measured out a good handful into its feeder, and began to wind the little handle. The smell of the beans immediately filled the room, a reassuring smell that gave Sig no comfort now.

  “Why the boots?” Wolff asked, almost casually.

  God damn me, the man misses nothing, thought Sig.

  “My … my feet were cold,” he offered as an explanation. He hurried on before he could be challenged. “It’s been a long, cold winter, everything frozen up, even the work at the Bergman mine was stopped when the winch gear stuck. The lake froze solid, and—”

  “But not solid enough.”

  Wolff dropped the words onto the floor like little spiders, which scuttled over to Sig and crawled up his legs, his back, his neck. He stopped grinding the coffee briefly but then determined that he would not let the man rile him.

  “I’m afraid so,” he said simply.

  Sig finished grinding the beans and took a mug down from the shelf. Opening the drawer of the grinder, he stuck a spoon into the lovely dark coffee grounds and lifted out a large rounded heap, placing it in the mug, as carefully as if it had been the gold dust his father used to weigh in Nome.

  He poured the water onto the grounds, which floated to the top, then began to stir for a while, letting them settle to the bottom of the mug again. Warily he walked over to Wolff and handed him the drink.

  Sig cursed himself. His hand was shaking.

  “Still cold?” Wolff said, and smiled. Again, Sig felt sick.

  Wolff sipped at the coffee in an almost laughable way, Sig thought, like an old lady sipping at her tea. He blew on it and took another sip.

  “What?” Wolff said.

  Sig shook his head.

  “Sorry, nothing.”

  Wolff put down the mug.

  “No. What do they mine?”

  “Oh. Oh. Iron. They mine iron. It’s an iron mine.”

  “Yes, I understand,” Wolff said, his lips grinning but his eyes flat, unreadable.

  “My father was the assayist.”

  “Yes,” said Wolff. “Like in Nome.”

  “I suppose so. Yes.”

  “Only there,” Wolff said, leaning forward in his chair, “it was something else we were mining, was it not?”

  Sig nodded.

  “My father says iron is a better thing to mine. He says—said—you can trust iron, that it’s a reliable thing to mine, not like gold. Nobody gets killed over iron mining, that’s what my father says.”

  Sig had been trying to lift the tone, to see if Wolff was actually not as frightening as he seemed, but he knew as soon as he’d uttered the words they’d been a mistake. Wolff just stared back at him, a gaze that stabbed, pinning him to the wall as if he’d been run through with a lance.

  “And what would you know about that?” Wolff drawled.

  “Nothing,” Sig said. “Nothing. I only meant …”

  He didn’t finish his sentence because he couldn’t think what to say.

  “Yes,” said Wolff. He took another sip of coffee. “Where the hell am I anyway? This town—Giron? No. Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. I know I came through Finland. Is this still Finland? And before that was Russia. My God! Russia. How big is that place? Do you have any idea how long it’s taken me?”

  Sig stood watching Wolff. He said nothing. He didn’t think the man really wanted him to say anything, and his tongue had suddenly loosened.

  “Yes, you do. I suppose you made that journey too.
Ten years. It’s taken me ten years to get here. But then I had a few false starts on the way …”

  He looked around the cabin.

  “Looks like it took you a few less. But then I didn’t know where I was going. Always looking, always looking. For a man and two children. Here. There. Asking, always asking … But now I’ve found you. How long have you been here? Three years, I think. Yes. And do you know why I came?”

  Sig shook his head.

  “Do you know why I came?” Wolff repeated.

  Still Sig said nothing.

  “I think you know. I think you do. I had some business to attend to with your father.”

  Sig took a deep breath, and once more felt that strange detachment from what he was saying, as if he were observing this little scene from above.

  “I’m very sorry your journey was wasted. But my father can’t help you anymore, and you’ve had your coffee. You’ll be needing to get back to Giron before dark. There’s a hotel. It’s quite good, I think. At the railway station.”

  He ran out of things to say, and Wolff stayed exactly where he was.

  “I don’t think you understand. Since your father is no longer with us, that makes you his heir.

  “That means my business is with you.”

  17

  Sun Day, after noon

  “Your father and I had a deal. We worked together. Back in Nome. We had a deal. An arrangement of sorts. It seems that he’d forgotten. He left, without saying good-bye. I came here to remind him of our arrangement.”

  He made it sound like a casual thing, a chat over a glass of beer maybe. It didn’t speak of ten years of what could only be an obsession.

  “I’m sorry,” said Sig. “I don’t know anything about it. I would help you if I could. I’m sure you can see. I was only little at the time. It was—”

  “Ten years ago. Yes. I know. It has taken me a whole damned decade to find you, and now … he dies the day before I arrive. But I think you might be able to help me. You were only a little boy then, but I’m sure you remember me.”